U.S. Pat. No. 5,333,213 to Koyama et al. describes a method and apparatus for image region extraction, extracting an image of a moving object in a dynamic image.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,067,014 to Bergen et al. describes a technique for analyzing two motions in successive image frames.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,134,472 to Abe describes a method and apparatus for moving object detection.
Published European patent application EP 0 532 823 A2 describes a method for separating images.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,274,453 to Maeda describes an image processing system using mask information to combine a plurality of images.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,345,313 to Blank describes an image editing system which takes a background and inserts part of an image in the background.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,093,869 to Alves et al. describes pattern recognition apparatus including high level graph matching.
Mathematical methods useful for image processing are described in the following references:
A. Rosenfeld, R. A. Hummel, and S. W. Zucker, "Scene Labeling by Relaxation Operations", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Vol. SMC--6, Num. 6, June 1976.
D. K. Ballard and C. M. Brown, Computer Vision, Prentice-Hall, 1982;
C. de Boor, A Practical Guide to Splines, New York, Springer-Verlag, 1978;
P. J. Schneider, "An algorithm for automatically fitting digitized curves", Graphic GEMs I, Academic Press, Inc.;
S. T. Barnard and W. B. Thompson, "Disparity analysis of images", IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence", PAMI--2, No. 4, July 1980;
Yu-Ichi Ohta, Takeo Kanada, and T. Sakai, "Color Information for Region Segmentation", Computer Graphics and Image Processing 13, 222 241, 1980;
Yija Lin, Jiqing Dou and Eryi Zhang, "Edge expression based on tree structure", Pattern Recognition Vol. 25, No. 5, pp 507-517, 1992;
G. G. Pieroni and M. F. Costabile, "A method for detecting correspondences in a sequence of modifying shapes", Pattern Recognition Letters 3 (1985); and
R. N. Strickland and Zuhua Mao, "Computing Correspondences in a sequence of non-rigid shapes", Pattern Recognition, Vol. 25, No 9, 1992, pp. 901-912.
The disclosures of all of the above publications and all references cited therein are hereby incorporated herein by reference. The disclosure of all publications mentioned in the specification and all references cited therein are also hereby incorporated herein by reference.